CEO, ULIMI
ULIMI innovates how businesses recruit & hire employees with SMS
Recruiting, hiring, and retaining talent sounds like it would be the essential job description of most HR departments, but it can also mean spending time sifting through applications from unqualified applications and going back and forth to schedule meetings with the ones you do want to potentially hire. And, the time you spend doing that is time you’re not spending checking in on the talent you do have to make sure they’re happy and satisfied in their work.
ULIMI saw an opportunity to streamline and automate many of these processes, merging AI chatbots with text messaging to enable HR professionals to focus on the right candidates as well as the employees they already have.
ULIMI leverages AI to help HR departments find & retain the best candidates
ULIMI identified three core areas where HR departments could use support: recruiting, hiring, and retention. To solve the need in each of these areas ULIMI developed three tools to help free up HR professionals for other tasks—ULIMI Hire, Recruitment, and Reach.
“Recruiters told us they spend an average of 30 minutes talking to candidates that just aren’t the right fit,” said Nick Dokich, CEO of ULIMI. “On top of that, they also spend upwards of 2 hours per candidate just trying to get them scheduled for an interview. Our solution is a chatbot to send pre-screening questions to find out if the candidate is a good fit for the company, saving both the candidate and the recruiter valuable time.”
ULIMI Hire enables their chatbot software to send questions for specific questions to a candidate over SMS. By leveraging SMS ULIMI not only improves response times, it enables candidates to respond without needing to install an app or visit a website; they simply respond using their phone at their convenience.
Once a candidate is pre-screened, time can be scheduled for an interview. Here again, ULIMI blends their AI chatbot with SMS to help free recruiters from playing phone tag, enabling the software to reach out and schedule interview times with the candidates.
“Everything but the actual calendar confirmation is powered through SMS,” said Nick. “The chatbot sends available times and dates and the candidate replies with the best option for them. Once the calendar invite comes they just have to confirm through their email or preferred calendar app.”
The final piece of the puzzle is checking in on employees. ULIMI – Reach enables employers to take the temperature of their workforce and understand what their employees need. And this doesn’t just happen at quarterly intervals, it happens at whatever cadence an employer wants.
As Nick put it, “You get hired and on day one you get a ping that says, ‘Welcome, good luck, here’s your manager and the front door code. And then maybe on day three you get another ping with a quick three-question survey, ‘What did you think of your manager? Was the job what you expected? Any general questions?’ And then they can ping again at 30 days, 60, 90…whatever cadence that fits with them and their employees for these stay interviews.”
All of these pings happen through SMS, enabling employees, particularly new employees that may not have access to all of the systems yet, to engage with the employer and provide real-time feedback on how they’re doing, but also how they think the employer is doing.
Bandwidth’s platform enables ULIMI to see a return on investment
ULIMI’s decision to work with Bandwidth really came down to ease of use. Bandwidth’s support documentation and quick responses to questions were refreshing for the ULIMI team, but it was our intuitive platform that really changed things.
Said Nick, “From an ROI standpoint, going through you guys probably saved my 20 employees two weeks of work. We were able to deliver our product within the timeline we had set ourselves. There was a quick turnaround from an implementation standpoint, which saved me time and money.”
Bandwidth’s combination of reliable SMS delivery and easy-to-integrate platform enabled ULIMI to quickly get to market and scale their business, with a goal of adding 500 organizations and 5,000 users.
ULIMI helps businesses get back to work
The COVID-19 pandemic changed the way all of us work. While many businesses moved to a remote-only model, for some, including essential workers, that’s just not an option. These organizations needed a way to conduct daily health checks on their employees to ensure that infections weren’t spreading, and that sick employees were getting the care they needed.
In the first half of 2020 this led ULIMI to launch their Reach solution. Reach automatically sends daily temperature and health checks to employees before their shift starts. The best part? Reach does this over SMS, which means no apps to download for employees while still enabling employers to be compliant and get the data they need to welcome workers back.
With Reach, ULIMI has conducted over 100,000 health checks across the country for clients like the Indianapolis Zoo, Fujitec America, and the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, all with zero time spent by organizations to create, conduct, record, and report the health screenings. Not only has it enabled businesses to reopen, but it’s saved them money on having to conduct these surveys themselves; for some it’s saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars.
As for what the future holds, ULIMI is starting to work directly with the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce on a Who’s Hiring chatbot (known as Heidi Hires) for workforce development, and has launched a conferencing platform for use in virtual trade shows, conferences, career fairs, and classrooms, all with an SMS component that allows for asynchronous communications between participants.
Want to learn more?
ULIMI has embraced the new way that businesses and employees communicate, and is working to make it as seamless, and painless, as possible for all parties. Want to see how Bandwidth can help your organization change the way people communicate? Get in touch with our team of experts, or visit our messaging page to learn more about our different solutions for SMS.
